African ccTLD are on the rise despite still registering abysmal number of less than 2 million records. Most African business owners will opt for more popular TLDs such as .COM because of cost and legacy value associated with these TLDs.
However, some African registries are coincidentally getting lots of foreign exchange from international users who are purchasing ccTLDs for what’s called “domain hacks”. Some domain owners might want to get these ccTLD because of their special relevance to their unique use cases. Perhaps they want a shorter URLs or that the ccTLD has a specific rhythm to it.
So even though you company is not located in these African countries, you can still acquire a domain name that serves your unique purpose.
- Djibouti (.DJ): We know that DJ is used to mean Disc Jockey. so the .DJ domain might be of interest to several Disc Jockeys who might want to create websites with their personal profiles. John Doe who works as a freelance DJ for instance might go with something like www.johndoe.dj. Everyone visiting the website knows they are accessing a page for a Disc Jockey. This costs about $80/year.
- Libya (.LY): International users might be interested in Libyan domain for words that end with the “ly” suffix. Think about words like fami.ly, supp.ly, friend.ly, prick.ly, sul.ly etc. Perhaps the most popular website with this domain is url shortner service bit.ly. This .ly goes for $75/year.
- Nigeria(.NG): This domain can be used to describe several verbs that end with .ng. The characters “ing” are used to describe continuous tense of verbs in the English language. So for instance you could words like groundbreaki.ng, shoppi.ng, brainstormi.ng, sli.ng, ki.ng, ri.ng, so.ng etc. These can be used as websites or as url shortners to existing websites. NG domains cost about $50/year.
- Sao Tome et Principe(.ST): São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island nation close to the equator in the west Africa off the coast of Gabon or Equatorial Guinea. ST is usually used as an abbreviation for “street” and is being marketed by registrars as such. The Washington Post uses .ST as part of their URL shortening domain, wapo.st, and it is also used by people of the state of Styria, in Austria, and the Swedish city of Stockholm. .st costs about $25/year.
- St. Helena(.SH): Saint Helena is an island and British overseas territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. .SH domains are popular with technical companies and developers because .sh is a file extension for Unix/Linux executable files or scripts. So .sh is usually used as home page for open source Linux scripts or tools. .sh costs about $50/year.
If you are interested in the prices of all African ccTLDs, you can read this post. Chances are that you don’t want to lose your domain name to squatters once your acquire it. So sign up with Site Monki to protect and monitor your domain name.
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